Beginning in 2012, every new building in France will have to meet low-consumption standards. This means that their primary energy consumption will have to be under 50 kW.h/(m².year) for heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting and hot water production. Digital simulation can contribute greatly to reaching this objective.Existing energy simulation environments were designed for classic buildings that have much higher consumption than the standards set for 2012, so it is important to see whether the models as well as the simulation methods used still correspond to these new building requirements. The objective of this work is to show the advantages of using an equation-based simulation environment to study the energy behaviour of buildings.For that purpose, several models were implemented in SIMSPARK platform: a phase-change material model, a model to take into account long-wave radiation calculating sunspot position, and an earth-to-air heat exchanger model. They were integrated into a global model of a low-consumption building to show the advantages of the simulation environment used. Its object-oriented feature make it possible to validate independently new models and then to integrate them easily into a model at a higher hierarchical level. Since the environment is equation-based and it is not ex ante oriented, the resolution direction of some problems could be inversed in a dynamic simulation. Finally, the robustness of the resolution methods used is shown.
